Webcam locked by another application.

Vista Hardware Devices

I have searched for the kind of problem that I am facing with the webcam and havent got any solutions for it yet, hope that I will get a solution here. I have a Toshiba laptop that has a built in Chicony webcam in it. Now the problem with the webcam is that, most of the time it will work flawlessly, but sometimes it wont open and give an error that it is locked by another program. But after I restart the laptop everything seems to be working fine again. So, my question is how do i solve this irritating problem, because i dont want to continuously restart the laptop to get this thing working.

You should possibly try to remember from when you have started facing this problem. If you have any idea about this date and time then you can perform System Restore to roll back your system to any restore point before that date and get back your webcam in working state. You are saying that you don't find any driver issue, but still i would suggest you to visit the official website of Toshiba Support Europe and search for the drivers for your respective laptop. Downloads the necessary drivers and utilities for your laptop and install it in your system. This should probably solve all your issue. And if still you are facing the problem then there might be some kind of virus issue. So i would recommend you to perform complete system scan and delete any kind of detected virus or malicious germs. Update your antivirus to keep your system protected form virus attacks.

Have you tried going into Task Manager and checking out the processes for which one the webcam is using, simply right click on those processes that the webcam is using and exit them. After that relaunch the webcam by using some messengers and see to it whether it is working fine now or not. You can also start task manager by going into Start and then Run and then type taskmgr.